"Dan," Marcus said, and his voice changed, became quieter, more personal, the voice of one professional to another. "Naomi Morgan is on your airplane. Seat 2A. She booked it herself, no PAD code, nobody knew. She just called me from the aisle and told me to ground the flight. I've done it. I suggest you go out there and find out why before somebody else does."
Whitaker sat very still for a moment.
He knew the name, of course. Everyone in the company knew the name. He had seen her twice in person, both times from a distance: once at a pilots' union meeting the year she took over, where she had stood at the front of a hotel ballroom in Newark and answered angry questions about the new contract for two hours without notes, and once at the Signature launch event at the hangar in Hamburg, where she had given a short speech that he had not been close enough to hear well. He remembered a slight young woman in a dark suit, standing very straight. He remembered thinking that she looked tired.
He had not known she was on the airplane. He looked down at the passenger manifest on the electronic flight bag clipped beside his knee and scrolled to the Signature cabin. There it was, between a Mr. Hargreave in 1A and a Mrs. Ashworth in 2C. MORGAN/NAOMI MS. 2A. Nothing beside it. No code, no note, no flag. Just a name.
"Copy, Marcus," he said. "Holding at the gate. I'll go out now."
He hung up the interphone and turned to Rosa.
"The CEO's in 2A," he said.
Rosa stared at him. "Our CEO?"
"Our CEO."
"Why didn't anybody tell us?"
"That," Whitaker said, unbuckling his harness, "is a very good question." He stood, ducked his head, and straightened his jacket. "Call the ground crew, tell them we're on a SOC hold and nobody touches the tug. Get the station on the radio and let them know. I'll be right back."
"Dan." Rosa looked up at him. "Is it bad?"
"I don't know yet," he said. "She grounded the airplane. So probably."
He reached for the latch of the cockpit door.
* * *
In 2A, Catherine Ashworth had turned away from the window.
She had heard the words. Everyone in the cabin had heard the words. But she was the only one who had been sitting with her back half-turned to the aisle, looking out at the gray morning, telling herself that it was over. And so she had not seen the young woman lift the phone. She had only heard the small chime of it unlocking, and then, after a moment, a voice speaking quietly, and then, as clear and hard as a stone dropped on a tile floor:
Ground flight 247 immediately.
She turned.
She turned so quickly that the back of her head bumped against the cream leather headrest. Her body went stiff, rigid, pressing backward into the seat as though some force had pushed her there. Her mouth had come open, and it stayed open, her jaw hanging slack in a way that she would have found ridiculous on anyone else and would have been mortified to see on herself. Her eyes were very wide. In the soft light from the window beside her they were a pale, washed blue, and the light caught them and made two small bright points in the center of each one, and in those two bright points there was nothing at all except shock.
A sound came out of her. It was a gasp, a sharp ragged intake of breath, high and thin. She did not know she had made it until she heard it.
The young woman in the aisle lowered the phone.
She held it at her side, in her right hand, loosely, the screen dark. She did not look at Catherine. She stood in the aisle beside row 2 with her blazer buttoned and her hands at her sides and her chin level, looking forward, down the length of the cabin toward the dark polished wood of the forward bulkhead. She did not move. The light from the ceiling fell straight down on her, on the braids and the gold earrings and the cream shoulders of her suit, and the thin lines of light along the floor on either side of the aisle ran forward past her feet like the lights of a runway, toward the bulkhead, toward the small illuminated seat marker that said 1 and 2A, toward the cabin screen on the wall, which was showing, silently, a looping video of the Meridian logo turning slowly against a field of dark blue.
Catherine sat frozen in 2A, looking up at her.